The other day, PA President Mahmoud Abbas made the claim that the Israeli expulsion of Hamas politicians from Jerusalem is “an obstacle to peace.” This follows similar claims of Israel’s intransigence, including the impediments to peace of stopping a terrorist-laden ship from entering Gaza through the blockade, demolishing illegally built Arab homes in Silwan, and building housing in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
If you follow Abbas’s logic, then it stands to reason that Israel, in order to promote peace, should turn a blind eye to illegal Arab building, curtail legal Jewish building, allow terrorists and weapons shipments to infiltrate its borders unfettered, and allow jihadist politicians to operate freely in its capital. Israel should do all this while continuing to supply food, medicine, and other necessaries to the “besieged” Gaza population. The Arabs, meanwhile, should continue to hold Corporal Gilad Shalit hostage, refusing to allow him any contact with the outside world, including the International Red Cross, to blame Israel for all of their internal problems and incompetence, and fire missiles and rockets at will into Israel as part of its plan to destroy the Jewish State. None of these, of course, can be construed as “obstacles to peace.”
The message is clear: the Arab leadership is not interested in peace. No matter how much land Israel offers them, without conditions which spell the destruction of Israel from within (i.e. changing Israeli citizenship laws to repeal the Law of Return, and replacing it with a Law of Return for Arabs who fled in 1948), there will be no peace. With language that brands the Jews European colonizers, that claims that the UN’s vote to establish the State of Israel in 1947 was an act to expiate its own guilt for the Shoah, and which refuses to recognize the Jews’ 3,000 year old roots in this land, it is the Arabs who constitute the greatest obstacle to peace. By teaching hatred of Jews in their schools, by celebrating the death-cult of jihad (including dancing in the streets after 9/11 and supporting Hizbullah in the Second Lebanon War), and refusing even to meet the Israelis face to face in negotiations (which might force them to make actual, real concessions in the name of peace), it is the Arabs who are the greatest obstacle to peace.
But they aren’t obstructing peace all by themselves. They have the fawning, sympathetic world behind them. This is a world that automatically sympathizes with whoever can paint himself to look like the underdog. It is too lazy to study history, and too ideological to look objectively at the facts in the present. It romanticizes what it has convinced itself is the “religion of peace” despite the abundant evidence that shows that this religion has spawned a cult of idol-worshipers who pray to a god of violence, blood, and burnt flesh. It listens, rapt, while the Arabs accuse Israel of killing their babies and creating another Holocaust, all the while alternating between denying that the Holocaust ever happened and promising an even bigger, better one very soon. It believes the Arabs when they claim to have roots in this land for thousands of years (even to the point of making the absurd claim to be Canaanites), while their own surnames reveal their origins to have been Egyptian, Syrian, or Lebanese. It is ready to trust whatever reports of starvation, squalor, and massacres come from Arab mouths, and refuses to apologize when those reports later turn out to be false. It is ready to believe in Israel’s guilt without any evidence at all, and to assume the worst of Israel based on its own ignorance, prejudice, and malice toward Jews, Zionists, and Israelis.
When he heard Israeli denials of a massacre in Jenin, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said, “Can the whole world be wrong?” Even when the whole world DID turn out to be wrong, when an independent investigation (in addition to many journalists and witnesses) found the claims of massacre to be baseless and bold exaggeration, neither Annan nor anyone else who had believed in them apologized. This isn’t particularly surprising, though it is illuminating. It shows not only that the whole world CAN be wrong, but that the whole world doesn’t really give a fig if it IS wrong.
So what really matters to most of the world outside Israel? Only this: That Israel should be as you desire it should be. If you despise Jews, want this land for yourself, or want someone besides the West to blame for your own stagnation and bankruptcy, Israel is here for you to slander, revile, accuse, and discredit. If you believe in truth, justice, and have the patience to hear the facts, Israel is here for you to watch, support, disagree with, and treat as you would other nations. But whichever reaction to have to Israel, be aware that your reaction says more about you, and who you are, than it does about Israel.
Shimshonit 
Leave a Reply